After a screening the other night of Our Mockingbird, a new documentary about the hold that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has on us still, more than 50 years on, a woman in the audience had a question for the filmmaker.

How, the woman asked Birmingham, Ala.-born Sandra Jaffe, could Alabamans abide the modern-day segregation on display in the movie, which shows students from all-white Mountain Brook High School and all-black Fairfield High School blown away by the experience of collaborating on a production of To Kill a Mockingbird?

I wanted to ask that woman this: Madam, have you been to America? Where many public schools are still mostly white, or mostly black and brown?

It’s been well over a half century since Brown vs. Board of Education outlawed segregation. Demographics have changed so much since then that for the first time ever, whites who are not Hispanic recorded more deaths than births last year. Yet even now an outrageous number of public schools remain monochromatic.

About one in four white public school students attends a racially isolated school, as does one in five black students. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, 27 percent of all white public school students attended a school that was at least 90 percent white in 2010, down from 49 percent in 1995. Eighteen percent of black public school students attended a school at least 90 percent black that year, down from 22 percent in 1995, and 17 percent of Hispanic students were in an overwhelmingly Hispanic school, up from 15 percent in 1995.

And though we may think we no longer need to engineer experiences that bring kids of different races together, Our Mockingbird strongly suggests otherwise.

In the 2006-2007 school year, Pat Yates, the longtime drama teacher at Mountain Brook, where filmmaker Jaffe went to high school, conspired with Fairfield’s longtime music director, Patsy Howze, to bring their students together to put on a show. Not just any show, but the one based on what the writer Diane McWhorter, who also grew up in Birmingham, describes in Our Mockingbird as “the book about the original sin” of slavery in this country.

Though Mountain Brook and Fairfield are just 16 miles apart, when the students meet, we see how very far they’ll have to travel. No one in either group has spent much time around what one kid calls “the opposite race.”

To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of the feared, misunderstood Boo Radley and of doomed Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly convicted of raping a white woman, despite the efforts of his lawyer (and Scout’s daddy), Atticus Finch. The week the movie premiered in Birmingham was also the week Bull Connor turned the police dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent protesters, including children.

Every one of the kids who was in the play says he or she was profoundly changed by it and by the collaboration. “I’d been around Caucasians here or there,” Stephanie Porterfield, now 24, told me in a telephone interview, “but now I can talk to anybody,” and does, in her job as a case manager for older Alabamans.

Gena Casey, now a fifth-grade teacher in a diverse school in Duncanville, Ala., says, “I had never had any interactions with black people before, and it was almost a relief to know people outside the little kingdom I lived in” didn’t have to be either feared or tiptoed around. “I cringe when I think about it now, but I almost felt like I was going to do mission work. And a lot of us, without wanting to admit it, were scared, not only to be on the other side of town, but to meet people that some in our community avoid.”

The biggest thing Casey, who volunteered that “my grandfather actually worked for Bull Connor,” Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety in the 1960s who used fire hoses and attack dogs on civil-rights protesters, walked away with was the ability and determination to talk about race — something she has her students do regularly.

“We’re not very far from our history,” she says, and talking about that “is the only way it’s going to get better.”

Just glance at those stats on racially isolated suburban and rural schools across the country, and you’ll see why that’s not only true in Alabama.

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